Bush’s lame-duck presidency waddles into farce

The humiliating impotence of the president’s final year is beginning,
says alexander cockburn

The one thing a president cannot afford to be is ridiculous. This week George Bush lurched into that fatal category and into the true twilight of his presidency, festooned with all the traditional discomfitures. Senior aides and close advisors are parleying with literary agents and finding compelling reason to quit the White House and spend more time with their families. In public even the First Lady seems to be edging away from her stricken mate.

The latest, fatal instrument of Bush's public humiliation is the National Intelligence Estimate proclaiming in its unclassified version that Iran stopped trying to build a nuclear weapon in 2003, thus deliberately, with humiliating clarity contradicting Bush and Cheney's unending invocation of the Iranian nuclear threat.

Now, in theory, an NIE represents the objective consensus of 16 US intelligence

Bush has lurched into the true twilight of his presidency

agencies on matters of national security. In practice it is a useful guide to how a bunch of bureaucratic knife-fighters assess the balance of forces in Washington.

In 2002 Bush and Cheney were strong enough to ram their dire assessments of Iraq's WMDs into the infamous October, 2002 NIE that began with the assertion that "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs - if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

The cover story for the recently released NIE on Iran, with its U-turn on previous assessments, is that new information suddenly became available. In practice this means that in the late summer senior intelligence officials figured the consensus in Washington and Wall Street against an attack on Iran was powerful enough for them to lower the boom on the neo-cons.

The latter have now retreated in disarray to their bunkers at the Weekly Standard and the National Review for a last stand, bellowing that it’s a filthy plot by peaceniks